Devil's Sea

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The TROV slipped under the surface of the still, black water, descending into the icy depths after being lowered on the crane. Ariana stared at the small video screen on which was superimposed the model of Erebus’s interior. Her hands were already freezing as she alternated between directing the TROV and slipping them inside her jacket to warm them.

“How long until you have it on target?” Miles asked, stamping his feet, also trying to stave off the cold.

“I don’t know.”

The ground shook, and a large crevice opened less than fifty feet away.

“I’d suggest sooner rather than later,” Miles said, “if at all possible.”

Ariana rubbed the screen, clearing off a thin layer of snow. The TROV's camera showed nothing but dark water, with the submersible’s searchlight cutting through only about twenty feet. According to the computer projection, she was on course for the underwater base of Erebus where the main lava tube was.

Jordan desperately turned the handlebars of the snowmobile as the sled threatened to pull him to one side, sending him tumbling down the slope. The front-runners made the correction and dug into the ice, straightening him out. Looking up, he could see the thick plume of smoke from the summit, now less than a half-mile away.

He gunned the engine.

”Got a sword I can borrow?” Dane asked as the Valkyries closed on their position. His mind was being pounded on all sides by input: Rachel, circling the power portal; the approaching cold wave of Valkyries; the almost overwhelming feeling of failure that pervaded it all.

“We should pull back,” Earhart said.

“And then?” Dane asked. “Get pinned in your caverns like animals being hunted down?”

“We were doing all right until you showed up,” she snapped.

“What the hell is all right?” Dane shot back. “You’re the one who said you were rats in the wall.”

“At least we were live rats,” Earhart said. She said something to one of the samurai, and he pulled a short sword out of its sheath and handed it to her. She passed it on to Dane. “I’m sorry. You’re right. At least we’ll make a stand here.”

Dane remembered how he had compared this place to Little Big Horn when he had first entered. The allusion was becoming more and more appropriate. He noted another of the samurai with the Viking, strapping an ax to the man’s arm. Ragnarok looked up at Dane and smiled, ready to go to Valhalla fighting.

“Damn it,” Ariana muttered as the TROV missed the tunnel opening and banged into the side of the volcano.

“Easy,” Miles said. “Better to be exact than fast.”

“Better to be both,” Ariana said as she realigned the submersible and gunned it into the dark opening.

When Jordan turned off the snowmobile, the trembling didn’t stop. He realized that the entire mountain was shaking. No one had ever been this near a volcano about to explode and survived to tell about it, so he had no idea how close what he was feeling was to detonation.

Dante III stood on the rim, ten feet away, like a large metal spider, frozen in place. The control mechanism was next to it, set on a small platform, waist high. Scrambling off the snowmobile, he ran over to the robot and looked down into the crater.

“Oh, my God,” he muttered. The lava bed had risen almost three hundred feet from the last time he’d been up here. It was bulging in the center, the twenty feet of hardened lava barely containing the forces below. He knew from what he was seeing that there was no time to hook the sled to Dante and walk the robot down. He keyed the FM radio connecting him with Ariana.

“Are you in place?”

Ariana heard the voice through the small earplug, but she didn’t reply right away. She had hardly any feeling left in her hands as she made an adjustment on the joystick, maneuvering TROV around a bend in the old lava tube.

“Give me a minute,” she finally said.

“We don’t have a minute.”

Ariana abruptly halted the submersible as a red glow appeared on the screen directly ahead. “I’m there. Do you have Dante in place?” she asked.”

“Detonate,” Jordan said. “Now!”

Ariana nodded at one of the Air Force men, who pressed a red button on a transmitter.

For a second, nothing happened; then the ground shook worse than it had yet, and Ariana fell to her knees. Looking out, she saw the ice shelf buckle along the side of the volcano.

Four miles away and eight hundred feet down, the nuclear bomb ripped into the main lava tube, splitting it wide open. Red-hot lava met freezing seawater and initially won the battle, pouring out into the water underneath the Ross Ice Shelf.

Jordan was seated on the snowmobile, the front skids on the very edge of the crater’s rim. The ground trembled fiercely, and he knew Ariana had detonated her nuke along the main tube.

He twisted the throttle, and the snowmobile edged over, into the crater, pulling the sled with it. He screamed at the top of his lungs as he plummeted down the side.

The nose of the snowmobile hit a boulder and it, and Jordan, went airborne, the sled right with him. Looking down, he could see the lava plug. In that brief glimpse, he knew it was subsiding, although there was still a lot of pressure under it that needed to be dissipated.

Jordan slammed his fist against the transmitter taped to his other arm.

The nuke went off with a flash halfway down to the lava plug.

Ariana was still on her knees when she heard the explosion. Looking up, she could see the top of the volcano blast outward, relieving the pressure there. She knew there was no way Jordan had gotten clear in time.

She staggered to her feet.

“Oh, no,” She murmured as the buckling of the ice continued like a slow, forty-foot-high wave toward her position.

Miles stepped between her and the approaching wall of ice and wrapped his arms around her. Then the ice below them rose up, and they fell between the blocks.